4.4. Preparing Files for Hard Disk Booting

The installer may be booted using boot files placed on an
existing hard drive partition, either launched from another operating
system or by invoking a boot loader directly from the BIOS.

A full, “pure network” installation can be achieved using this
technique. This avoids all hassles of removable media, like finding
and burning CD images or struggling with too numerous and
unreliable floppy disks.

The installer cannot boot from files on an HFS+ file system. MacOS
System 8.1 and above may use HFS+ file systems; NewWorld PowerMacs all
use HFS+. To determine whether your existing file system is HFS+,
select Get Info for the volume in question. HFS
file systems appear as Mac OS Standard, while
HFS+ file systems say Mac OS Extended. You must
have an HFS partition in order to exchange files between MacOS and
Linux, in particular the installation files you download.

Different programs are used for hard disk installation system booting,
depending on whether the system is a “NewWorld” or an
“OldWorld” model.

4.4.1. Hard Disk Installer Booting for OldWorld Macs

The boot-floppy-hfs floppy uses
miBoot to launch Linux installation, but
miBoot cannot easily be used for hard disk
booting. BootX, launched from MacOS,
supports booting from files placed on the hard
disk. BootX can also be used to dual-boot
MacOS and Linux after your Debian installation is complete. For the
Performa 6360, it appears that quik cannot make the
hard disk bootable. So BootX is required
on that model.

Download and unstuff the BootX
distribution, available from http://penguinppc.org/projects/bootx/,
or in the
dists/woody/main/disks-powerpc/current/powermac
directory on Debian http/ftp mirrors and official Debian CDs. Use
Stuffit Expander to extract it from its
archive. Within the package, there is an empty folder called
Linux Kernels. Download
linux.bin and
ramdisk.image.gz from the
disks-powerpc/current/powermac folder, and place
them in the Linux Kernels folder. Then place the
Linux Kernels folder in the active System Folder.

4.4.2. Hard Disk Installer Booting for NewWorld Macs

NewWorld PowerMacs support booting from a network or an ISO9660
CD-ROM, as well as loading ELF binaries directly from the hard
disk. These machines will boot Linux directly via
yaboot, which supports loading a kernel and RAMdisk
directly from an ext2 partition, as well as dual-booting with
MacOS. Hard disk booting of the installer is particularly appropriate
for newer machines without floppy drives. BootX is
not supported and must not be used on NewWorld PowerMacs.

Copy (not move) the following four files which
you downloaded earlier from the Debian archives, onto the root level
of your hard drive (this can be accomplished by
option-dragging each file to the hard drive icon).

vmlinux

initrd.gz

yaboot

yaboot.conf

Make a note of the partition number of the MacOS partition where you
place these files. If you have the MacOS pdisk
program, you can use the L command to check for the
partition number. You will need this partition number for the command
you type at the Open Firmware prompt when you boot the installer.